Twelve Men

by Theodore Dreiser

  As for Miss E----, the Wellesley-Bryn Mawr-Mt. Holyoke assistant, who from the first had agreed with me that here indeed was a writer of promise, a genius really, he, as I have said, at first despised her. Later, by dint of exulting in his force, sincerity of purpose, his keen insight and all but braggart strength, she managed, probably on account of her looks and physical graces, to install herself in his confidence and to convince him that she was not only an honest admirer of his skill but one who had taste and judgment of no mean caliber. Thereafter he was about as agreeable as a semi-caged wild animal would be about any office.

  But above all he was affronted by M----, the publisher of the paper, concerning whom he could find no words equal to his contemptuous thoughts of him. The publisher, as L---- made quite bold to say to me, was little more than a “dodging, rat-like financial ferret,” a “financial stool-pigeon for some trust or other,” a “shrewd, material little shopkeeper.” This because M---- was accustomed to enter and force a conversation here and there, anxious of course to gather the full import of all these various energies and enthusiasms. One of the things which L---- most resented in him at the time was his air of supreme material well-being, his obvious attempt and wish not to convey it, his carefully-cut clothes, his car, his numerous assistants and secretaries following him here and there from various other organizations with which he was connected.

  M----‘s idea, as he always said, was to spend and to live, only it wasn’t. He merely induced others so to do. One of his customs (and it must have impressed L---- very much, innocent newcomer that he was) was to have one or another of his hirelings announce his passing from one “important” meeting to another, within or without his own building, telephone messages being “thrown in” on his line or barred out, wherever he happened to be at the moment and when, presumably, he was deep in one of those literary conferences or confidences with one employee or another or with a group, for which he rapidly developed a passion. Another of his vanities was to have his automobile announced and he be almost forced into it by impetuous secretaries, who, because of orders previously given, insisted that he must be made to keep certain important engagements. Or he would send for one of his hirelings, wherever he chanced to be—club, restaurant, his home—midnight if necessary, to confer with him on some subject of great moment, and the hireling was supposed to call a taxi and come post haste in order that he might not be kept waiting.

  “God!” L---- once remarked in my presence. “To think that a thinking being has to be beholden to a thing like that for his weekly income! Somebody ought to tap him with a feather-duster and kill him!”

  But the manner in which L---- developed in this atmosphere! It was interesting. At first, before the magazine became so significant or well-organized, it was a great pleasure for me to associate with him outside office hours, and a curious and vivid companion he made. He was so intensely avid of life, so intolerant of the old, of anything different to that which he personally desired or saw, that at times it was most difficult to say anything at all for fear of meeting a rebuff or at least a caustic objection. As I was very pleased to note, he had a passion for seeing, as all youth should have when it first comes to the great city—the great bridges, the new tunnels just then being completed or dug, the harbor and bay, Coney Island, the two new and great railway terminals, then under construction. Most, though, he reveled in different and even depressing neighborhoods—Eighth Avenue, for instance, about which he later wrote a story, and a very good one (“A Quiet Duet”); Hell’s Kitchen, that neighborhood that lies (or did), on the West Side of Manhattan, between Eighth and Tenth Avenues, Thirty-sixth and Forty-first Streets; Little Italy, the region below Delancey and north of Worth Street on the East Side; Chinatown; Washington Street (Syria in America); the Greeks in Twenty-seventh and eighth Streets, West Side. All these and many more phases of New York’s multiplex life took his full and restless attention. Once he said to me quite excitedly, walking up Eighth Avenue at two in the morning-I was showing him some rear tenement slums in the summertime—“God, how I hate to go to bed in this town! I’m afraid something will happen while I’m asleep and I won’t see it!” That was exactly how he felt all the time, I am sure.

  And in those days he was most simple, a very Spartan of a boy. He hadn’t the least taste for drink, lived in a small hall-bedroom somewhere—Eighth Avenue, I believe—and took his meals in those shabby little quick-lunch rooms where the characters were more important to him than the food. (My hat—my hat is in my hand!) Intellectually he was so stern and ambitious that I all but stood in awe of and reverence before him. Here, I said to myself, is one who will really do; let him be as savage as he pleases. In America he probably needs to be.

  And during this short time, what scraps of his early life he revealed! By degrees I picked up bits of his early deprivations and difficulties, if such they might be called. He had been a newspaper reporter, or had tried to be, in Kansas City, had worked in the college restaurant and laundry of the middle-West State university from which he had graduated, to help pay his way. Afterward he had assisted the janitor of some great skyscraper somewhere—Kansas City, I believe—and, what was most pleasing to me, he in nowise emphasized these as youthful difficulties or made any comment as to their being “hard.” Neither did he try to boastingly minimize them as nothing at all—another wretched pose. From him I learned that throughout his youth he had been carried here and there by the iron woman who was his mother and whom he seemed to adore in some grim contentious way, smothering his comments as though he disliked to say anything at all, and yet describing her at times as coarse and vulgar, but a mother to him “all right,” someone who had made marked sacrifices for him.

  She had once “run” a restaurant in a Western mining camp, had then or later carried him as a puling baby under her shawl or cloak across the Mojave Desert, on foot a part of the way. Apparently he did not know who his father was, and he was not very much concerned to know whether she did or not. His father had died, he said, when he was a baby. Later his mother, then a cook in some railroad hotel in Texas, had sent him to school there. Later still she had been a “bawler out,” if you know what that means, an employee of a loan shark and used by him to compel delinquent, albeit petty and pathetic, creditors to pay their dues or then and there, before all their fellow-workers, be screamed at for their delinquency about the shop in which they worked! Later she became a private detective! an insurance agent—God knows what—a kind of rough man-woman, as she turned out to be, but all the while clinging to this boy, her pet, no doubt her dream of perfection. She had by turns sent him to common and high school and to college, remitting him such sums of money as she might to pay his way. Later still (at that very time in fact) she was seeking to come to New York to keep house for him, only he would not have that, perhaps sensing the need of greater freedom. But he wrote her regularly, as he confessed to me, and in later years I believe sent her a part of his earnings, which were to be saved by her for him against a rainy day. Among his posthumous writings later I found a very lovely story (“His Mother”), describing her and himself in unsparing and yet loving terms, a compound of the tender and the brutal in his own soul.

  The thing that always made me hope for the best was that at that time he was not at all concerned with the petty little moralic and economic definitions and distinctions which were floating about his American world in one form and another. Indeed he seemed to be entirely free of and even alien to them. What he had heard about the indwelling and abiding perfections of the human soul had gone, and rightly so, in one ear and out the other. He respected the virtues, but he knew of and reckoned with die antipathetic vices which gave them their reason for being. To him the thief was almost as important as the saint, the reason for the saint’s being. And, better still, he had not the least interest in American politics or society—a wonderful sign. The American dream of “getting ahead” financially and socially was not part of him—another mark royal. All life was fascinating, accep
table, to be interpreted if one had the skill; it was a great distinction to have the skill—worth endless pains to acquire it.

  But how unwilling would the average American of his day have been, stuffed as he was and still is with book and picture drivel about artists and art, to accept L---- as anything more than a raw, callow yokel, presuming to assail the outer portals of the temple with his muddy feet! A romping, stamping, irritable soul, with more the air of a young railroad brakeman or “hand,” than an artist, and with so much coarse language at times and such brutality of thought as to bar him completely, one might say, from having anything to do with great fiction, great artistic conceptions, or the temple of art. What, sit with the mighty!—that coarse youth, with darkish-brown hair parted at one side and combed over one ear, in the manner of a grandiose barber; with those thick-soled and none too shapely brown shoes, that none too well-made store suit of clothes, that little round brown hat, more often a cap, pulled rather savagely and vulgarly, even insultingly, over one eye; that coarse frieze overcoat, still worn on cold spring days, its “corners” back and front turned up by the damp and from being indifferently sat on; that brash corn-cob pipe and bag of cheap tobacco, extracted and lit at odd moments; what, that youth with the aggressive, irritating vibrant manner—almost the young tough with a chip on his shoulder looking for one to even so much as indicate that he is not all he should be! Positively, there was something brutal and yet cosmic (not comic) about him, his intellectual and art pretensions considered. At times his waspishness and bravado palled even on me. He was too aggressive, too forceful, too intolerant, I said. He should be softer. At other times I felt that he needed to be all that and more to “get by,” as he would have said. I wanted to modify him a little—and yet I didn’t—and I remained drawn to him in spite of many irritating little circumstances, all but infuriating at times, and actually calculated, it seemed, with a kind of savage skill to reduce what he conceived to be my lofty superiority. At times I thought he ought to be killed—like a father meditating on an unruly son—but the mood soon passed and his literary ability made amends for everything.

  In so far as the magazine was concerned, once it began to grow and attract attention he was for me its most important asset; not that he did so much directly as that he provided a definite standard toward which we all had to work. Not incuriously, he was swiftly recognized for what he was by all who came in touch with the magazine. In the first place, interested in his progress, I had seen to it that he was properly introduced wherever that was possible and of benefit to him, and later on, by sheer force of his mental capacity and integrity, his dreams and his critical skill, he managed to center about him an entire band of seeking young writers, artists, poets, playwrights, aspiring musicians; an amusing and as interesting a group as I have ever seen. Their points of rendezvous appeared to be those same shabby quick-lunches in back streets or even on the principal thoroughfares about Times Square, or they met in each other’s rooms or my office at night after I had gone, giving me as an excuse that they had work to do. And during all this time the air fairly hummed with rumors of new singers, dancers, plays, stories being begun or under way, articles and essays contemplated; avid, if none too well financed frolics or bohemian midnight suppers here and there. Money was by no means plentiful, and in consequence there was endless borrowing and “paying up” among them. Among the most enthusiastic members of this circle, as I had begun to note, and finally rather nervously, were my art-director, a valiant knight in Bohemia if ever there was one, and she of Bryn Mawr-Wellesley standards. My makeup editor, as well as various contributors who had since become more or less closely identified with the magazine, were also following him up all the time.

  If not directly profitable it was enlivening, and I was fairly well convinced by now that from the point of view of being “aware,” “in touch with,” “in sympathy with” many of the principal tendencies and undercurrents which make for a magazine’s success and precedence, this group was as valuable to me as any might well be. It constituted a “kitchen cabinet” of sorts and brought hundreds of interesting ideas to the surface, and from all directions. Now it would be a new and hitherto unheard-of tenor who was to be brought from abroad and introduced with great noise to repute-loving Americans; a new sculptor or painter who had never been heard of in America; a great actor, perhaps, or poet or writer. I listened to any quantity of gossip in regard to new movements that were ready to burst upon the world, in sculpture, painting, the scriptic art. About the whole group there was much that was exceedingly warm, youthful, full of dreams. They were intensely informative and full of hope, and I used to look at them and wonder which one, if any, was destined to have his dreams realized.

  Of L---- however I never had the least doubt. He began, it is true, to adopt rather more liberal tendencies, to wish always to be part and parcel of this gayety, this rushing here and there; and he drank at times—due principally, as I thought, to my wildling art-director, who had no sense or reserve in matters material or artistic and who was all for a bacchanalian career, cost what it might. On more than one occasion I heard L---- declaring roundly, apropos of some group scheme of pilgrimage, “No, no! I will not. I am going home now!” He had a story he wanted to work on, an article to finish. At the same time he would often agree that if by a certain time, when he was through, they were still at a certain place, or a second or third, he would look them up. Never, apparently, did his work suffer in the least.

  And it was about this time that I began to gather the true source and import of his literary predisposition. He was literally obsessed, as I now discovered, with Continental and more especially the French conception of art in writing. He had studied the works as well as the temperaments and experiences (more especially the latter, I fear) of such writers as de Maupassant, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Balzac, de Musset, Sand, Daudet, Dumas junior, and Zola, as well as a number of the more recent writers: Hervieu, Bourget, Louys and their contemporaries. Most of all, though, he was impressed, and deeply, by the life and art of de Maupassant, his method of approach, his unbiased outlook on life, his freedom from moral and religious and even sentimental predisposition. In the beginning of his literary career I really believe he slaved to imitate him exactly, although he could not very well escape the American temperament and rearing by which he was hopelessly conditioned. A certain Western critic and editor, to whom he had first addressed his hopes and scribblings before coming to me, writing me after L----‘s death in reference to a period antedating that in which I had known him, observed, “He was crazy about the fin de siecle stuff that then held the boards and from which (I hope the recording angel will put it to my credit) I steered him clear.” I think so; but he was still very much interested in it. He admired Aubrey Beardsley, the poster artists of France, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Rops, the Yellow Book, even Oscar Wilde, although his was a far more substantial and plebeian and even radical point of view.

  Unfortunately for L----, I have always thought, there now thrust himself forward the publisher and owner of the magazine, who from previously having been content to see that the mercantile affairs of the magazine were in good order, had decided that since it was attracting attention he should be allowed to share in its literary and artistic prestige, should indeed be closely identified with it and recognized as its true source and inspiration—a thing which in no fashion had been contemplated by me when I went there. From having agreed very distinctly with me that no such interference would at any time be indulged in, he now came forward with a plan for an advisory council which was to consist of himself and the very members of the staff which I had created.

  I could not object and it did not disturb me so much personally. For some time I had been sensing that the thing was for me no end in itself, but an incident. This same I felt to be true for L----, who had been taking more and more interest in the magazine’s technical composition. At the same time I saw no immediate way of arranging my affairs and departing, which left me, for a very little wh
ile, more or less of a spectator. During this time I had the dissatisfaction of noting the growth of an influence with L---- which could, as I saw, prove only harmful. M---- was no suitable guide for him. He was a brilliant but superficial and very material type who was convinced that in the having and holding of many things material—houses, lands, corporation stocks, a place in the clubs and circles of those who were materially prosperous—was really to achieve all that was significant in the now or the hereafter. Knowing comparatively nothing of either art or letters, or that subtle thing which makes for personality and atmosphere in a magazine or in writing (and especially the latter), that grateful something which attracts and detains one, he was nevertheless convinced that he did. And what was more, he was determined not only to make friends with and hold all those whom I might have attracted, providing they could prove useful to him, but also a number of a much more successful group in these fields, those who had already achieved repute in a more commonplace and popular way and were therefore presumably possessed of a following and with the power to exact a high return for their product, and for the magazine, regardless of intrinsic merit. His constant talk was of money, its power to attract and buy, the significance of all things material. He now wanted the magazine to be representative of this glowing element, and at the same time, paradoxical as it might seem, the best that might be in literary and artistic thought.